Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its upcoming group exhibition,
“Nighttown.” Deriving its title from the ‘Nighttown’ phantasmagoria of
Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus at the near end of Ulysses, the
exhiition will include a selection of works from ten artists; Robert
Adams, Lewis Baltz, Dike Blair, John Divola, Frank Gohlke, Shirley
Irons, Michael Ormerod, Mark Ruwedel, Toshio Shibata, and Henry Wessel.

Centered around the transformations of places and objects as
witnessed through delimited fields of vision, the immediate worlds of
these images take on a mythopoeic figuration through what is not so
immediately perceivable. Like Bloom and Dedalus’ hallucinatory
transformations of places and objects as witnessed through the specter
of night, the veiling darkness inherent in all of the show’s works
alludes to a similar disengagement between what is rational and what
appears not. There is a slightly noir character in each of the show’s
works: Lewis Baltz’s disquietingly lit Mercedes in a garage in North Wall from New Industrial Parks; Robert Adams’ deadpan shot of overgrown foliage on a moonlit sidewalk from Summer Nights; the vaporous cloud at the end of the dirt road in Henry Wessel’s New Mexico, 1968; the lone figure running away from the reach of the camera flash in John Divola’s As Far as I Could Get.

The poetic strangeness of these night images are furthered by the
absence of humanity within them. The paintings of Dike Blair and
Shirley Irons depict night as areas of disuse or lonely travel, and
Mark Ruwedel’s image of a particularly optimistic –and seemingly empty-
house in the desert points toward the uncanny. The show also represents
the first viewing in the United States of the work of the late British
photographer Michael Ormerod, who is represented in the show by a scene
depcting a drive-in theater in the background, taken in the America
west of which the artist recurringly explored in his short life.

For further information on the exhibition, including artists’
curriculum viates and biographies, please contact the gallery by phone
at (310) 453-0043 or by email at info@galleryluisotti.com.